Congress May Fix VA Hospitals By Merging Them With Military

Congress is exploring a dramatic transformation of Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals that would merge them with Department of Defense (DOD) facilities and treat active duty soldiers and veterans side by side.

Many veterans and lawmakers believe the VA healthcare system is in dire need of complete overhaul, and the idea of privatizing it has been increasingly popular. But lawmakers have also quietly been pondering a fix that would take it in the opposite direction — militarization.

A massive pilot project called Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago just completed a five-year trial, with seemingly positive results. The joint DOD-VA hospital now sees most patients within one day and nearly all within one month of their desired appointments, and ranks in the top five of VA hospitals in overall wait times.

This stellar performance comes as veterans have died waiting for care at traditional VA hospitals. Lovell also excels in patient satisfaction ratings and was named a top performer by a nationwide hospital accreditation group.

Lovell is now the only place in the country where a Korean War vet and a sailor’s pregnant wife may pass each other in the hallway. If any VA staff member needed a reminder that the elderly they are treating are there because of heroic service, the sight of a uniformed Navy recruit also on his way to a physical exam might drive home the point.

The joint hospital’s capacity for treating women vets has improved because DOD hospitals have long cared for the wives of soldiers; active-duty soldiers benefit from VA’s experience in mental health.

The DOD and VA have been authorized to share resources since the 1980s and there are nine smaller jointly operated facilities around the country, but none has ever been as large as Lovell. When a Navy hospital and VA medical center were both dilapidated, then-Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk urged the building of a combined facility. The DOD and VA agreed to the merger in 2002 and it opened in 2010 after a $130 million construction effort.

Congress conceived of it as a pilot program that would report back after five years, with success meaning merging DOD and VA hospitals in other cities would be considered.

It is unclear to what extent the current Congress will embrace the larger vision set into motion years ago. Sen. Johnny Isakson, chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, refused to say whether he even knows about the massive experiment, much less what his opinion on replicating it nationwide it might be.

But one aspect of the merger — having military engineers take over for VA’s beleaguered construction office when it comes to building hospitals — already spread nationwide this month, with Congress giving all VA construction projects to the Army Corps of Engineers. The VA’s biggest recent project, a Colorado hospital, went $1 billion over budget and department officials could not explain why. Even so, the VA’s construction administrator got $30,000 in bonuses.

So far, the merger’s financial savings appear underwhelming, and Congress did not seem to press the VA and DoD to realize efficiencies, a major benefit of most mergers. Lovell simply requested a budget equal to those of the two predecessor hospitals combined, and congressional appropriators agreed.

“Cost savings, mainly one-time construction savings, were one of the original considerations in deciding to integrate the two facilities, but FHCC officials told us that they are unable to determine whether these savings were actually realized,” a Government Accountability Office report found.

Some savings have been apparent. The hospital voluntarily returned $12 million, with annual appropriations now reduced by that amount. More significantly, it has not needed to tap into extra emergency funding for things like an expensive Hepatitis C medicine, as other VA hospitals have.

And improvements to the level of service are apparent, with the hospital rising in VA’s ranking system.

Veterans navigating traditional VA hospitals have long yearned for care that was closer in quality to what they received as enlisted men.

“We take pretty good care of our active duty,” Steve Holt, Lovell’s director, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Navy simply wouldn’t tolerate a healthcare system that became a bottleneck for recruit readiness, he said, and that fact has benefited vets from all military branches.

The merger has also impacted the culture of the workforce vets are treated by, with 1,000 active-duty military working alongside 2,000 VA civil servants. Military members are known for strong work ethic and unforgiving standards, which vets say they haven’t always seen with VA staff.

Holt is a veteran and a doctor, which also sets the facility apart; only two out of 60 directors in the VA’s traditional healthcare system fit that description.

“One in three of my staff wear a uniform, and there’s a realization of how they relate when they see those sailors that makes them more loyal, more appreciative and more willing to speak up and say ‘you know if you did it this way, you’d do it better,'” he said.

The military culture has permeated the civilian staff in part because sailors who work at the hospital or are there for treatment go on to work there in a civilian capacity after they leave the military. Better yet, military medics work there after they retire from the armed forces, alleviating a shortage of doctors that is one reason the VA fails to treat patients in a timely manner.

The cross-exposure “is an important source of recruitment,” Holt said.

An operating agreement attempts to navigate the merger of two massive bureaucracies. Lovell’s agreement says it is supposed to split top jobs between VA and military personnel, and have a VA person in the top job. Holt became a VA executive after retiring from an Air Force hospital in 2005, and Lovell’s second-in-command is a Navy captain.

Military influence is especially heavy now at Lovell because the VA has failed to assign executives to the hospital, leaving many positions filled in an “acting” capacity by military, a review of personnel listings shows.

In combining the two organizations, administrators had to merge two different sets of policies, and said that they selected the most stringent from each.

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Next month, reports assessing Lovell’s five years are due from the DOD, the VA, the Government Accountability Office and an auditor. Administrators will deem it a success.

“They want to continue us, they thought that would be more efficient and effective,” Holt said. “Personally I’d like to see the model done elsewhere.”

They have the backing of Kirk, who is now chairman of the Senate’s VA appropriations subcommittee. “I would like to see the Lovell model become one that we can reproduce across the country in order to combine resources and improve veteran care,” Kirk said.

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